


The Vakarian Code.

by quondam



Series: The Shepard Code [2]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-22
Updated: 2017-02-22
Packaged: 2018-09-26 08:06:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9875159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quondam/pseuds/quondam
Summary: The story of the hundred years that follow Shepard's death. Garrus struggles through his grief, marries, becomes a father, and learns what it is to keep living.This is a companion piece to my story, "The Shepard Code."





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is a companion piece that takes place from Garrus' POV following Shepard's death all the way up through the events in "The Shepard Code." I've had a lot of requests over the years for a continuation to "The Shepard Code," and while this isn't exactly a sequel, I hope it fills in some of the details that were missing.

It takes a couple years for it to happen. It’s a slow creep, like sitting in boiling water. You don’t realize you’ve been cooked until it’s already too late.

He thinks that maybe when they find her body, he’ll be able to find peace. It’s over a year, just after he’s abandoned his search for her in Sol to return to Palaven, before he gets word via Liara that the Alliance has changed her status from MIA to KIA.

They think it’s a mercy by shielding him from the official reports on her death, but he hears the words they toss around anyway. Things like vaporized and ash. It still haunts him, however, and all he can think of is that first time she’d died and how her body had been left floating through space, cold and dead. Maybe she’s out there now too.

Her face, he wonders. Was there anything left of that? Her face he’d memorized with his eyes and with his hands; her eyes he’d stared into and the eyelids he’d watched when she slept; the lips he’d learned to kiss and had found comfort in; the smooth skin marred by scars and dotted with freckles he’d tried to count.

Garrus has seen enough of the dead to know better. There’d be nothing left of that beautiful face. She comes to him at night like clockwork in those months that follow: not smiling and full of life, but rotten peeling flesh and a missing jaw.

When they hold her ceremonial funeral he’ll find peace, he believes, but the monument the Alliance builds in her honor on Earth does nothing to stop the nightmares. The soldiers salute, brave words are spoken, and there’s a stone carving of her likeness. It looks like her, but it isn’t.

He heads back to Palaven afterwards, shunning the rest of the crew just as he’d done all those years before. _Maybe when I’m home again I’ll_ … but the story plays out the same as always. Garrus sees her in the blades of tall grass blowing in the wind, recalls a time they’d been walking through vegetation near waist height, her finger tips skimming the tops of flowers and greenery like she was a girl delighting in nature and not on a mission to take a couple dozen lives.

The local estuary forces a memory on him of a touch down on Eden Prime not that long ago, when they’d needed to breathe and recharge. Some had gone back in search of more information from that dig site they’d pulled Javik from, but Shepard had other plans and he’d been brought along, not that he’d ever needed much forcing. She’d stripped down on the sandy banks of a local river that fed fresh water into the ocean and he’d done the same though not before savoring the view of the woman he loved, bare and blushing, begging him to join. It was a planet of haunting memories, just not for that brief moment in time.

 _I’ll start working again and I won’t think of her_ , he promises. It works for a time when the hierarchy puts him to use, only because it’s overwhelming all at once to be back in a normal life. It reminds him of C-Sec because there’s office politics and actual politics, and he hates all of it just the same. It’s infuriating and frustrating, and it just makes him think of Shepard more.

His sister sees him frequently and he knows it’s because she’s scared for him. She brings groceries and cooks the meals his mother used to make when they were only children, sits with him and talks about their father, and sometimes when he smiles enough and maybe even laughs, she asks about Shepard. It takes time, but she wears him down, and he finds that the more he talks about her the less she comes to him in nightmares, broken and dead. It’s a relief in some ways, but somewhere along the way he almost starts to believe he’d rather have her that way than not at all.

Solana is predictable in the way she touches his arm, rubs his back, listens to him keen over the woman he loves and lost.

“I miss her,” he always says.

“I know you do,” she always answers.

“I can’t live without her.”

There’s a hug and a nuzzling of her head to his and she grips him tight, squeezes painfully at his joints so he’s awake when he hears her words. “You have to.”

The words become a mantra. I have to. There’s part of him that thinks Shepard would have loved for the two of them to go out in a blaze of glory together, perhaps there were even words she’d said to that effect some time ago over drinks. He knows her better though, and she would take him just as firmly as Solana does until he repeats the words back. You have to. You have to. You have to. _I have to_.

He throws himself into his work as the years pass, floating through different positions with an ease that his work during the war has afforded him. It takes time, but he finds a spot he finds satisfying and it has nothing to do with military or guns or ancient creatures come back to wipe advanced life from the galaxy. The job isn’t one with upward mobility or for someone with designs for power, glory, fame. It’s the opposite of the last few years really, and that’s why it’s perfect.

It’s a slow burn that he stops thinking about her every night, that he lets the memories of the past shift to the back of his mind while plans for the future of Palaven and his people sit at the forefront.

Then he meets a woman and that balance once again is gone.

She’s beautiful in a way he didn’t know he still felt interest for. Shepard had been all he’d had and dreamt of for so long, it doesn’t occur to him that there’s anything left in him still capable of looking at another person with longing. Krati is of his age, a turian that he discovers had grown up not too far from where he had. They share a number of the same memories of shops long since gone and the best places for getting up to mischief, only they’d never crossed paths. It’s funny, those coincidences.

It’s the third time they see one another before he realizes all their prior meetings have been dates, and she takes it upon herself to lean in and touch her forehead and nose to his own while they stand outside of her apartment door. It’s instinct by now that he responds by trying to kiss her and she pulls back, blinking a silent question.

“I’m sorry,” he says, flustered, and doesn’t stay to see her reaction.

He rages in his quarters back home, throwing anything easily lifted. He wretches and eventually purges dinner, wails and cries without tears. There’s a weight on his chest, or at least it feels like a vice is there, squeezing and tightening until he doesn’t feel as though he can breathe at all. _I can’t, I won’t._

Solana arrives, no doubt spurred on by an erratic call he’d made on his way back, and she takes him in her arms much in the same way he knows she’d done for their mother when she was at her worst.

“I won’t forget her,” he says between gasps of breath. “I can’t.”

His sister doesn’t try to insist otherwise, just helps him to bed when he’s too tired to resist. She sits by his bed, stroking the side of his fringe and that’s all he remembers until morning. It’s a vague memory, the night before, and if Solana wasn’t still there it would be easy to dismiss.

She’s stayed though, swept up the broken bits and righted the furniture and made him tea. The cup is tepid where it waits for him on the counter, but he takes it with a nod of thanks, and sips it anyway.

“What happened?” Solana ventures eventually, a question he knows is coming.

“I tried to kiss a woman,” he says. “Like a human would.”

She offers that sad half smile she always does, though he knows it isn’t patronizing. She understands.

“I don’t even know how to be turian anymore, half the time I think in human words and phrases. I hate the smell of this place and miss the human soap she used to use, miss the feel of her hair under my talons. Someone at work told me I sound more like a human when I laugh, that my mannerisms aren’t turian, that I don’t belong here.”

“Fuck them.”

“I don’t care,” he says, “but I know I don’t belong here.”

“You belong wherever you want to belong,” Solana responds, her patience tested. “You’re not the same brother that left Palaven for C-Sec years ago, but you shouldn’t be. You’re a person made up of everyone you’ve known, the people you’ve loved. And if you spend your life alone or don’t, it doesn’t matter, no one will be able to take that away from you.”

Her words follow him for weeks.

They nudge and push and work at him until he finally messages Krati after the self-imposed communication blackout. She agrees to meet again though he doesn’t rightfully know why, and this time it’s Garrus who leans in to her. To his shock, she meets him half way and takes him by the wrist, inviting his hand to skim over her narrow waist.

He thinks of Shepard and how her waist was softer despite the muscle underneath, how it was thicker and wider than that of any turian. It had taken some time to get used to the differences in her body, but there’d been a point when his ideals had flipped. Hard plate had been replaced with soft tender flesh. The allure of a narrowed waist had been supplanted by breasts.

But as this woman before him invites him into her apartment, Garrus steps forward instead of pulls back.

It’s not as though Shepard had been the only person he’d ever been with. There’d been others that had come before her, mostly one time things with a few relationships that lasted only a handful of months before the magic was lost, or he realized there was never any magic at all, just the desperate wish for some.

So when Krati begins to undress him, the movements are familiar in a way that’s like recalling a dream from long ago. Muscle memory, perhaps. He fumbles for her zippers and buttons in all the places he expects to find them unlike that first time with Shepard when her clothing hadn’t made any sense at all.

His body betrays him when it hardly takes more than the touch of her hand and the flick of a tongue to harden his cock and coax it out. He feels anger brewing somewhere underneath, only just barely kept at bay by hormones. When he looks down to between his legs from where he sits on the edge of the bed, it’s his mind playing tricks on him as he swears he sees that flash of red hair, can almost feel her taking him in her mouth.

Garrus palms her head as he often did and Krati looks up, red markings replacing the hair, and it startles him for a second. He blinks away the memory and she crawls atop him and the bed, straddling his lap. She takes the lead for them both, slipping him inside of her and Garrus has to close his eyes tight as it happens. It feels good—it feels great—it’s been so damn long since he’s had the urge at all and even longer since it’s been with another person, but he can’t look at her. Not yet, not just yet.

Her palm finds the back of his head, tips of talons easing into the space just beneath his fringe and it’s intoxicating. Shepard had needed guidance in the little things but had made up for it in being a quick study and the slight increase in dexterity she had over her five fingers. A moan leave his mouth and it encourages Krati on. Garrus licks at her neck, nipping the soft flesh there and she returns her own throaty groan of pleasure. His hand finds her chest, only it comes up empty of the breast he expects to find, so he slides it down to that waist of hers, and pulls her close.

It’s not the kind of reach-and-flexibility of his liaisons of the past, but they both find release so it’s enough for the night. She eases herself from him and encourages him back on the bed.

The aftermath had been almost as good as the sex with Shepard. She’d disappear to the bathroom to clean herself up then rejoin him, tucking her head into the crook of his neck, the length of her against him. It’s not something easily done with another turian due to their unforgiving thick carapaces and as he lays there, he begs for an opening to leave. To go.

Krati props herself up on an elbow beside him, looking down, and traces a finger along his damaged mandible. He thinks she’s only just staring, learning his face, but then she leans in closer and touches her mouth to his in an approximate imitation of what he’d done the first time.

He pulls away after a moment, almost just as she’d done to him.

“I know about your human,” she says.

Garrus doesn’t know how to respond to that. He feels ashamed almost, like his fraternization with a human made him a deviant. To some of his kind, he knew they saw it as such.

“I don’t mind if you want me to…” Krati starts again, then brushes a talon over the plates of his mouth.

He just shakes his head. “No. No, it’s okay.”

The nod she gives him seems shy and uncertain and she lies back down beside him.

He waits to get up until he thinks she’s finally fallen asleep, but she stirs immediately when his weight lifts from the bed, her eyes watching him in the dark as he pulls his clothes back on.

“You don’t have to stay,” she speaks, “until there comes a day that you want to.”

Her boldness catches him off guard and he wants to tell her she’s wrong, that she shouldn’t presume to know what he will or won’t do—but that boldness had been what had pulled him to Shepard, hadn’t it? He returns to her side and just barely brushes his forehead to hers.

“I’ll call you tomorrow.”

It feels like a line, but part of him knows it’s not.

At home, he pours himself a drink. Another, then another. When he’s good and buzzed, alcohol warming his system and just making the edges of his world seem fuzzy, he digs through the crates he’d never unpacked after all this time. They’re Shepard’s things, mostly clothing and personal effects left behind on the Normandy when she’d gone to her death. He draws a t-shirt to his nose, one she commonly used to wear to bed if she was wearing anything at all, and breathes her in. Remarkably, it’s still nearly exactly as he remembers.

“You’re not coming back,” he says to the boxes, a cold stand in for her. “You’re dead.”

There’s no answer, no ghost to stare at him sadly, no memory haunting his head to touch his cheek and give him a reserved smile of acceptance. There’s nothing but an empty room.

He sees Krati the next day and nearly every one thereafter. She tells him the story of her life, first just the barebones framework of it, and over time she starts to fill in the details. She’d been one of five daughters, but now just one of three. The other two, they’d been lost when Palaven had been attacked and he’d been up on Menae watching the fire burn their home from afar. Only, she’d been there in the thick of it, had witnessed nearly everything of her family’s life disappear until only their memories remained of how it used to be.

It’s nice to think of life before the war with her, to reminisce on their childhoods and upbringings. She tells him of her parents—still alive, thank the spirits—and how they were professors, how she’d survived her mandatory military time and then bowed out from that life without so much as a figurative tear shed.

When he doesn’t realize it, he lets her in on the details of his life as well: his late mother, his father still strict and stern after everything they suffered, life on the now obliterated citadel, even his times aboard both Normandys. If she fakes her fascination, he doesn’t know it, and he tells every tale with a bit of bittersweetness woven into it. He also doesn’t mention Shepard nearly as much as he should to be accurate to the stories, and he never brings up the relationship they shared that extended beyond commander and soldier. It’s not that he doesn’t want to hurt Krati with tales of the woman he loved—still does—it’s just that Shepard feels like his and his alone.

There’s a ghost between them a lot of nights even if they don’t admit it. Soon it becomes habit, that dance they do, until it doesn’t feel strange at all.

His father likes her and perhaps that stings worst of all. If he’d brought Shepard home, Garrus doesn’t think his father would have approved of such a match, hero to the galaxy as she was. He’d looked forward to it some nights when he and Shepard had been holed up in the captain’s quarters, a final middle finger—as the humans called it—to his old man to bind himself to a human in such a permanent fashion.

Solana approves, though she lets him know in an indirect manner. “You’re smiling a lot these days,” she tells him when they’re alone and though the effect isn’t intended, it happens to wipe the grin from his features. She’s still there to remind him: “you’re allowed to be happy.”

It’s like that for a long time: a pleasant coexistence. Through the grapevine he hears Kaidan has married a fellow officer and he’s to be a father; Liara’s still lost herself in her work as much as ever; and Wrex… he’s a father tens of times over by now. Palaven looks more like it used to than it has since the Reapers touched down, and that’s when he knows the world has gone on even without Shepard.

He asks Krati to bind herself to him not long after he comes to that understanding. She doesn’t hesitate when she says yes, and it makes him think of that human woman that feels a lifetime away now, and how he’d whispered the same question to her half a dozen times while she’d slept. He’d never been brave enough to say it to her awake.

The ceremony is a small affair held planetside. It’s Liara’s sudden appearance that truly shakes him and he doesn’t waste a second in speaking to her, as if she’s come with some news heard from far across the galaxy that’ll put a stop to the service.

 _Shepard’s alive_ , he dreams of her saying as he crosses the room to her. _She’s alive and we’ve found her and she’s coming back. Don’t go through with this. Wait for her_.

But Liara merely embraces him as old friends would and smiles as she speaks.

“She would be so happy to see you now.”

There’s a breath in him that he doesn’t realize he’s been holding until he shudders on its exhale. He’d been foolish. He’d been cruel. He’d nearly gone into this marriage still thinking of someone else.

He holds his eyes on the woman to be his partner when they’re formally bound together as man and wife. _This is who I am marrying_ , he tells himself. _And I love her_. It isn’t a lie he force feeds himself. After all this time, the years he’s spent getting to know this woman, he does love her, though it’s not the same as the love he’d shared with Shepard.

When they sleep that night, this time he makes a different promise to a different woman as she sleeps. It’s a desperate promise he should’ve made far earlier than now. _I’ll be the husband you need me to be_.

They move in together into a new home, this one bigger than the last that had been to himself, and the balancing act of two lives joining together is harder than he thought. For a relationship that had existed in almost constant peace in the years preceding, that first year of marriage tests both of their limits and endurance.

It’s just after their first anniversary when Krati tells him she’s with child, and though it’s something they were neither trying for nor attempting to prevent, the revelation startles him. He’s to be a father. Truth be told, he’s never thought he’d actually hear those words.

Krati seems to wear a glow of her impending motherhood and her waist thickens, though not anywhere near as much as he’d seen from the humans back on the Citadel. He tries to look forward to it with some amount of joy, tries to form the same connection with his child as his mate seems to already have from that first day. Garrus doesn’t find it.

It’s near the end of the gestation when they quarrel over some of his old things that occupy a spare room. They’ve already prepared another space for their child, but she catches him sifting through the contents of the boxes one night and come morning, she’s brewing for a fight.

“You’ve never let her go,” she tells him.

It takes a moment to understand what he’s just walked into, and he tries to find the words to calm her, but they don’t come.

“You shouldn’t have bound yourself to me and made a child if you never intended on letting Shepard go.”

There’s no rebuttal because it’s true. He’d made that promise to her and to himself on their wedding night, only he hadn’t kept his word.

“Why did you even bother?” And she keens, shoulders shaking and quivering as she shows her grief.

“I’m sorry,” he says and when he tries to approach, she pushes him aside and returns her hand to settle low on her slightly swollen abdomen.

Garrus spends the following nights in the guest bedroom, and two days later does Krati tolerate him just enough to tell him she feels labor upon her. He takes her to the nearest clinic and there he watches his mate with the midwife as the labor progresses. She refuses his aid, though he truthfully know there’s nothing he can do but offer encouragement, until the end when she favors him over the midwife. The birth is quick though she yells and moans through it. In the end, there’s a tiny boy crying in his swaddle in Garrus’ arms.

He cries, too.

His son is so light he can barely believe it. He can’t believe anything at all, actually. Especially that this boy is his and hers and was made from absolutely nothing.

Krati doesn’t dare break up the moment at first, just watches with a serene smile on her face, eyes heavy lidded and exhausted. “Let me see him.”

He settles their son into her arms and he can hardly imagine a more perfect sight.

“Thank you,” he tells her, caressing her short fringe and then her mandible until she can tear her eyes from their child. “I’m so sorry.” He means it this time.

She seems to be able to tell that too, and so she nods to him and returns her attention to their son.

That night he sleeps at home alone for the first time in forever and he dreams of Shepard. She’s alive in it, looking as though the last decade and then some hasn’t touched her. There’s not a single extra wrinkle to her face. They make love and afterwards she touches his hand to her stomach.

“I’m pregnant,” she tells him, tears in eyes.

In his head, he knows he’s dreaming, but he doesn’t have the heart to tell this Shepard that, like it would break her heart to hear she isn’t real at all.

He kisses her hard and brings her in close until every inch of her is against every inch of him. Garrus smiles and laughs, cups her head in his hand until his talons are knotted in her hair.

“I love you.”

Shepard smiles back at him through the blur of tears. They’re happy ones, he knows. Humans cry because of grief and anger and frustration, but they also cry because of joy.

When he wakes, he wants nothing more than to go back to sleep to visit her again, but the sun shines through the window into his eyes and he knows that the Shepard in his dream is lost to him just like the real one. He’ll never see her round with their child if it was even biologically possible at all. He’ll never even see her smile or cry again.

It rocks him—and he spends nearly an hour in the shower trying to rid himself of the thoughts of her even if he doesn’t truly want to let her go. The water covers his body including the plates of his cheeks and he lets himself imagine they’re tears he’s physically unable to shed, but wants to just the same. Those tears always seemed so cleansing for Shepard the few times she’d let them fall in front of him. Like just that saline could let her reset, start over, and clear her troubles out of her system.

When he brings his mate and son—Celsus, they’ve named him, after her father—home that day, he’s removed the crates from the spare room to a storage space in town. Krati doesn’t fail to notice and presses her forehead to his, nuzzling her thank you.

 _This is the life I have,_ he tells himself. _And I must live it_.

Fatherhood is the sweetest balm to him he never expected. He likes it more than work, more than seeing the stars, more than exploring a new planet and saving the damn galaxy. Krati jokes with him that he should take leave of his job to raise their child and he always laughs and smiles, and deep inside he cherishes the possibility. He doesn’t mind the sleepless nights, volunteering to get up while his mate sleeps.

Those firsts like smiles and wobbly steps and even when his son’s fringe begins to grow are the currency he lives his life by. He’s determined not to raise his son as his own father did, or as most turians would. The humans had it different—and when he rocks his son to sleep at night he thinks of the stories Shepard had told him of her family on Mindoir, when all had seemed peaceful. Her father had been a gentle man, she said, and she’d loved him fiercely, trusting him in every part of her life. She’d have liked to tell him about Garrus, she’d even said, and swore the man would have loved him just for loving her.

Garrus would raise his children to love him just as fiercely.

Their boy isn’t even a year old when Garrus crawls into bed at night beside his wife and whispers: “we should make another.”

Krati welcomes him into her arms just as much as their bed and it takes a few cycles of the moon, but soon enough there’s another Vakarian on the way—a boy named Jovian.

It’s two years after that they welcome their third son, Nerva, and Krati tells him it’s their last, she’s finished. He nods and understands: their house is never quiet anymore, children always underfoot. Three was a lot as it was, at least by the standards which he was raised. Post-war, however, three is barely doing their civic duty to repopulate.

It’s their fourth child, one last surprise, that really breaks him when the babe is born and Garrus meets his first and only daughter.

Aelia’s bigger than her brothers were and opens her eyes to look at him only minutes after her birth, staring like she already knows him. He dotes on her with the energy of a first time father, not yet tired with age or jaded with experience.

He still thinks of Shepard from time to time; she’ll never be removed from him completely, but time has changed him and the memories, not to mention the family he now has to call his own. The arrival of his daughter brings the past back to him, though, in ways he never knew it would. He wants to raise her to be strong and fearless, brave and bold, a force to be reckoned with, that much like Shepard, still smiles and laugh and inspires loyalty in all she meets. His work is cut out for him.

Those jokes of the past are suddenly more than just that, and Garrus takes leave of his job while his mate continues her work, and stays home with the children they share. He’ll go back some day, he tells his superiors and his wife, but he doesn’t know if that’s the truth. Instead it’s teaching children how to read and write their more complicated characters, and teaching his daughter how to chirp her very first words.

Even as they grow and one by one take off to school, he doesn’t feel the urge to return to his work. They’re living comfortably from what his mate brings in and a payout from the hierarchy for his service, even a sizable account of Shepard’s that she’d tacked his name onto at the end of the war. Their finances are never thin, and so he doesn’t return, at least not back there.

Time continues to pass as it is wont to do and though Garrus has never tried to deceive his children in regards to his past, it’s never been something he talks of amongst them. His eldest accuses him of such perceived treason one day after school, hurt and betrayed that he’d felt the fool when a classmate had drawn attention to his surname.

“Why wouldn’t you tell me?” He asks and sees indignant anger in his son that’s all too familiar.

Garrus wishes he had an easy answer for why. “It hurts to think about it,” he finally says, his voice rasping, and that disarms Celsus enough to at least diffuse some of the anger.

His son’s mandibles quiver, a sign of his emotional frailty. “But you had a whole life and we don’t know anything about it. Does mom even know?”

Garrus rubs a palm between the plates of Celsus’ back to bring him a soothing comfort. “She knows. Not everything, but she knows. You’re almost a man now,” he says and feels the boy straighten up a little, as if the word was a reminder of all that loomed for him. “I’d answer any questions if you wanted to ask.”

He has none at the time, but in the and weeks that follow, Celsus comes to him nearly once a day with another inquisition. Garrus wasn’t lying, it does hurt to think about, especially to go through the details that fade away from him a little more every day, to think about it from a realistic standpoint rather than fond memories softened by time. But he fulfills his promise to Celsus, and answers each and every question that gnaws at him. He treasures that time, truthfully, and when Celsus is off to start his mandated military service in almost no time at all, it’ll be this memory of time with him that keeps Garrus from falling apart when his son becomes a man.

Krati isn’t a fool, she knows the things her son and her mate talk of, and not just because Garrus had told her of that troubling first conversation. He doesn’t sleep well at night following the discussions they have, waking restless in the darkness of their room, and letting the anxiety of war plague him during the day. She draws him near when he can’t sleep, whispers the sweet nothings he likes to hear, and makes promises she can only hope she can keep about how they’ll never see that type of war again.

There’s a message a little while later, something passed on to him through a couple different hands before it finally reaches him. An invitation to Earth, it states, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Galaxy War as the humans now call it.

“Twenty-five years?” Krati asks, brow plate raised in a question.

“Earth years,” he answers. Palaven had their own celebrations every so often, but their planets’ orbits were different, leaving the timing between Palaven and Earth slightly skewed. “They’re big on celebrating things like decades and quarters and halves of centuries there, so I hear.”

The invitation lingers unanswered for some time and when it’s nearly too late, Krati reminds him. “Are you not going to go?”

“I barely even take part in the ones here.” There’d been requests for him to speak at a number and he had in those first years following the war, if only to use it as a vehicle to promote further peace in the galaxy, and remind his people that a life lived secluded and cut off from everyone else would do them no good. He hadn’t followed his own advice, of course. Garrus hadn’t left Palaven since he’d first returned home.

“Do you want me to go with you?”

“You couldnt—work and the kids and—“

Krati comes closer, takes his face in her hands. “I’d understand if you said you didn’t want me there because of what you shared with Shepard.”

His hands wrap around her wrists gently, keeping her close, reveling in the comfort only a person you’ve spent your life with can bring. “I love _you_ ,” he says, but doesn’t say the rest: I’ll also always love her.

“If you don’t think I know that after all these years, you really are the biggest fool I’ve ever met.” Her eyes are shining with the hint of her smile and it brings one to him, too. “But living this life with us here doesn’t mean you have to pretend like there wasn’t a different life before all of us, too. There are friends you haven’t seen in all this time.”

They’d all split and gone their separate ways since then, but he doubts he would ever refer to them as anything other than friends and family. There are some bonds you can’t shake, no matter how much time passes.

“Let’s go,” she decides for him just like that and he knows she’s been thinking of this for some time. “We’ll bring the children and you can show them the stars for the first time and they can see what a hero their father was and always will be.”

It’s a lot to plan in only a matter of days, though Aelia is the only one fretting at the school work she’s bound to miss.

“Your teachers will send something for you to keep busy with,” he promises her, but it’s hardly necessary, because soon the dream of space and traveling the galaxy thrill her more than all the worries she seems to carry for a child of her age.

Aboard their ship, Garrus realizes he’s forgotten just how long space travel takes when there’s no missions to plan, inventory to count, or equipment to calibrate. He’d looked forward to their travel time then, if only because it had meant a break from being shot at, but now it’s merely a thing to be endured, a barrier in the way.

“But _why_ are we going?” Aelia asks him on the third day as they walk the length of the civilian deck.

“I fought in a war a long time ago,” he tells her simply. “And they’re celebrating it’s end and some people who worked very hard to do just that. Some friends of mine will be there that I haven’t seen in a long time, and you’ll get to meet them all.”

That excites her enough and over the days that follow she asks question after question about all those she’s likely to meet. What race are they? Will there be other children her age? Do his friends know about her already? They were children of Palaven and had been isolated as such, with few visitors from other planets crossing their paths in every day life. It would be an awakening they were unlikely to ever get again until after they started their service.

The smell of Earth is almost as familiar to him as Palaven is, and he doesn’t rightfully know why. He’d spent little time there compared to some other places, but the memories of that planet had been so sharp and vibrant, burned into his brain by trauma, that the scent—even without fire and a haze of debris floating through the air—is distinctive. Transporting almost.

London isn’t how he remembered it at all—they’ve rebuilt here just as they have across most of the rest of the galaxy, and there’s been no expense spared in recreating the details on even the simplest of buildings. His family isn’t the only non-humans, not by a long shot given the impending celebrations, though he knows his children still feel the eyes on them as much as they do their own staring at the variety of humans and others that pass. It’s crowded there, almost claustrophobically so.

They spend time seeing the city and walking through parks, delighting in all the strange creatures that live amongst them. If he didn’t know better, Garrus wouldn’t recall this place at all. There are lush plots of grass and streets swept clean, people gathered outside bars and milling about with alcohol in hand like dozens hadn’t once died where they stand. Do they remember at all? He asks himself and an anger builds hard in his belly.

It’s late by time the whole lot of them are on their way back to their provided accommodations when a street sign tugs at the tendril of a memory. He stops, only realizing he’s done so when Aelia tugs at the hand she’s been holding.

“I’m tired,” she reminds him for the fifth time that day.

He remains still, looks one direction then the next, and suddenly feels as if the pressure at his ears is overwhelming, a surge of static noise filling them like he was standing next to the engine of a ship.

He knows this place now. There’s a cafe standing where he saw Shepard for the last time.

“Celsus, take your sister’s hand,” Krati commands before she turns her attention back to Garrus.

“My love,” she whispers.

He can see Shepard now, clear as day before him, swears he can feel the weight of Liara and Vega holding him up and back. The smell of death is all around them and spirits she looks so tired. Garrus wants to grab her and never let go, to tell her she can’t possibly do this, it isn’t worth it, even if the fate of the galaxy is at hand. He wants to grab her so she can’t walk right into her death.

Her voice rings in his ears. _No matter what happens here, you know I love you. I always will._

Krati cups his cheek and he palms the back of her hand just as he’d done twenty five years ago. “Shep—“

He blinks away the vacant stare and it’s his wife before him and not Shepard. His mandibles tremble.

“We shouldn’t have come,” he says, voice cracking. His head shakes, almost erratic for a moment. “I shouldn’t have come back.”

Aelia pulls free of her brother’s hold despite his protests and runs straight into Garrus, arms wrapped around him and holding tight. He knows the sound she makes, he’s known it since she was born, that soft sad precursor to her own cry. It’s enough to pull him out of the past for the time being.

“Daddy,” she says into the fabric of his clothes.

“It’s alright, darling,” and he picks her up, carries her like she’s far younger than she is as they make their way back. He’d always been her solace when she needed it, and even as he offers that to her now, she is also his.

The children find sleep easily enough that night after the exhaustion of the day hits them, and he’s thankful for the time to be alone with his wife.

“What did you see out there today?”

He’s fresh from the shower, towel slung around his hips as he stares into the mirror over the sink. His reflection is a far older man than he feels.

“They built a restaurant there.”

“Where?”

“I wonder if my blood’s underneath the foundation,” he muses, and doesn’t wipe away the mirror when the remaining steam fogs it again.

“Garrus.”

He makes his way back over to where she sits on the bed and drops the towel as he places his foot on the bed, runs his talon along a jagged, nasty scar on his upper leg. “I got hit and she sent me back to the ship. This scar is the reason I’m alive today and not dead beside Shepard.” He’d have followed her into that beam, he knows, there’d have been no stopping him.

“Do you know how many people died there?” His voice grows louder, angrier, even if it isn’t directed at her but the universe and fate in general. “And they built a fucking shop on it like nothing happened at all.”

His mate just drinks him in, letting him speak words he needs to let out.

“I said goodbye to her there and for a moment I swore I could… I swore she was there in front of me. Not just there, standing on the street corner with the rest of us, but like I was back there in the worst of it.”

He sits beside her, head in his hands while he slumps forward. Krati idly soothes at the back of his neck.

“I can’t imagine what it’s like,” she says, just barely above a whisper, “but I can’t say I’m not glad for your injury because I can’t picture my life without you or our children in it.”

There’d been more times than he can remember when he’d wished to go back and die with her on that fateful night, but now… now he can’t imagine feeling that way again.

Come morning, he puts on his bravest face for the sake of their children even if he knows they look at him warily, searching for any signs of the broken man they’d bared witnessed to the day before.

There’s crowds of people gathered—the numbers of which he’s never seen in one place—where the ceremony’s to take place and they’re ushered to a closed off section nearest to the front. There’s people, humans mostly, corralled in with them that greet him like no time has passed at all, people with faces he only vaguely recognizes but he pretends to know them just as well as they seem to know him.

Kaidan’s the first of the crew that finds him and they embrace in a way they've never done before. His hair’s more gray than black now and a little heavier too, a man that looks like he knows relaxation for once.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” Kaidan says, eyes wet.

There are introductions to be made between their families and Garrus meets a pair of sons close in age that both share Kaidan’s smile and say things like _we’ve heard all about you over the years_.

There’s Joker and Vega and even Miranda, though she looks the most like her old self out of all of them. He should’ve expected that, he thinks.

“Look at you, Scars,” Vega says like they’d only just parted yesterday. “Repopulating the galaxy so the rest of us don’t have to.”

If he could blush, he would, but there’s a pride that swells in him when he looks to his mate and the children they share. Vega greets them all individually and has the kids laughing and smiling, inside jokes already born and fostered.

The ceremony itself is full of pomp and fanfare, a celebration of their continued survival. Hackett—he’s an old man now—gives a speech that dares not remind the public just how nearly they’d almost lost the whole thing, instead preferring to inspire. There are thank yous to each and every species that played a part, and it’s refreshing to see that it hasn’t yet been glazed over into an event that only clings to the human aspect of it. It is in a way, very much, a celebration of unity. Shepard would be proud.

They talk of the Alliance council lost in the first wave, of the spectacular leaders that emerged on both the Alliance and civilian side that helped lead them to victory. Kahlee Sanders—spirits, he didn’t even know she’d survived the war—speaks for a moment on David Anderson. And then there’s Liara on stage and he knows what’s coming.

The account she gives of Shepard is both larger than life and humanizing. He listens with rapt attention, like he wasn’t there by Shepard’s side for more time than Liara was, like he’s about to miss some new detail about Shepard he’d never known. Photos of Shepard display on the erected screens and he wants to but he just can’t look away. Some of these he’s never seen before; they’re not the usual stock footage and some of them even date back to her first days in military service. In one photo, she looks barely more than a child with fuller cheeks and wide eyes even if she wears a military uniform. In another, Shepard stands in that very city between Anderson and himself, overlooking what he knows was the plan for the final push.

There’s an applause when it’s all said and done and then a moment of silence for the dead, for the fallen. When the crowds begin to disperse, Garrus leads his family through the grounds of the memorial site. They pass a series of holograms with names scrolling endlessly to remember the dead, and a long strip of a reflecting pool. On the far side, he finds what he’s come for, and there she is.

Shepard.

Flowers and candles litter the stone base where her likeness stands and it’s touching, truly it is, to know that there are others out there that haven’t forgotten her either. Someday they will, but today is not yet that day.

He presses his palm over the engraving of her name and for a second just shuts his eyes, breathes in and out deep. It isn't a grave, there isn't any part of her buried there, but it feels as close as he'll ever get again. _I shouldn’t have waited this long to come back._

When he opens his eyes and turns back to his family, his mate is trading a few credits for some flowers from a local woman selling them to tourists. She disperses the bundle—some common Earth flower he’s seen before but can’t be sure of the name—amongst herself and the children and ushers their four along, pointing at a bare spot for their offering to be placed.

His heart simultaneously breaks and mends at the action.

“She was Dad’s commander,” he hears Celsus telling the others what information he’d already known from their discussions. “And she died saving everyone from the Reapers.”

Aelia ventures a glance up to him, as if seeing him under a new light.

“Your father loved her very much,” Krati says without a second’s worth of hesitation and without the hint of jealousy he’d always feared. She waits, resting her flowers as is the human custom. “Before me, before all of you, they were in love. She kept your father safe and we should give her our thanks for everything she did.”

It’s Celsus’ turn to look to him, only this time there isn’t an accusation of anger for keeping the truth from him. There’s only a sadness there and Garrus hopes his son, or any of his children, never have to know the kind of grief he’s had to bear.

“Thank you,” he says to his mate when she returns to him, and slides his arm around her shoulder. Garrus kisses her forehead in an action he’d never been able to shake.

He spends the evening catching up with the members of the crew that have made it out to London, sharing drinks and stories. A few old, but mostly new ones, like those about their children or lives since the worlds had been given a second chance.

Before they leave Earth, they make a few stops around the globe to see the planet from one extreme to the next. They go for a dip in water bluer than anything on Palaven, so crystal clear you can see the fish swim past your ankles. They marvel at the desert and jungles. And most of all, they play in the snow until it takes them half a day to warm back up. It’s a true vacation, one they’ve never had off world, and he knows these memories will last him a lifetime.

Time moves quick back home and soon enough they see their eldest off for his service. He doesn’t want Celsus to go, would do anything to keep him at home and safe, but Garrus knows his son needs it and further more, wants it. Jovian and Nerva follow behind until it’s just Aelia left with them. She’s a tough thing, that one, with a shot nearly as good as his own already. He’s proud of it, and so is she.

When all their children are gone, Garrus dreams that maybe they’ll come back home when their service is completed, but that house never does fill back up again. He feels the passage of time in the pain of his joints, the fading tone of his plates. He and Krati get to find out what it’s like to be just a pair once more, and though it isn’t like it was before they’d been married, it suits them.

His children marry and he becomes a grandfather for the first time. Holding his grandchild isn’t like that first time he’d held his son, but it’s close and it’s still a pure kind of joy. More grandchildren follow like the floodgates have been opened, and soon their home is bustling and full on every holiday and family gathering. Garrus loves it: the way the house seems to hum with life like the Normandy once had, with all the people buzzing about.

One of Celsus’ boys, a child named Nero with the kind of serious disposition that usually doesn’t belong to one so young, needles him with questions every time he’s over. He’s heard stories from his father, surely, and no doubt Celsus has passed the torch on back to him to fulfill the boy’s endless curiosity.

He starts with the classic stories first, edited for a child’s mind. Saren at the Citadel, the Collector Base, and everyone’s favorite: the time he and Shepard fought off a Thresher Maw on Tuchanka. Nero comes with requests for stories and photos as the years go by, like he’s done his research in anticipation of time time spent with his grandfather. Every time, Garrus slips in a little more truth here and there. A man grown now, he deserves that much.

Garrus’ father passes, and years later his sister. That overwhelming grief revisits him all over again, only just fading away when Krati falls ill for an extended time. It’s long and slow, the kind of death he wishes on no one, and he stays by her side through all of it. Garrus sleeps beside her still, every day fearing he’ll wake to find her cold and without breath until he finally does.

They’d been expecting it for some time now, but that anticipation doesn’t make it any easier. He’d had the better part of a century with her, riding out clear and stormy weather together. She’d given him their children and only offered patience when he didn’t deserve it.

When their sons and daughter and all those grandchildren swarm together to lay Krati Vakarian to rest, he leans on them to see him through it in the immediate aftermath.

The house is the worst part—he sees her everywhere alongside the memories of their children, all their lives spent in that home. Shepard had haunted him long ago in his sleep, and now it’s his late wife’s turn. He'd nearly forgotten what it was like to be the only one left, the one to carry that burden. It's like he's prepared his whole life for it.

Nero continues to visit like he always does when he’s on leave from the military. He’s a lifer, that one, with no family to call his own, and while Garrus wishes his grandson would find someone for a partner, he’s happy for his company. They talk of Krati and Celsus, talk of the new Primarch and how he’s a buffoon compared to some of the ones of the past, and as always, they talk of the events of almost a hundred years ago. A pair of ships called the Normandy, a war, and a woman named Shepard. There’s a picture of him and Shepard in the hallway that’s hung since Krati placed it there after their trip to Earth and he catches Nero staring at it from time to time.

“I wanted to see you before I left,” he says. “They’re sending me out to lead a crew past the edge of the known galaxy, see what we can find.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“Why not?”

Garrus laughs, it’s reserved and quiet, not the kind he used to have when he was younger. “You’re going to run straight into trouble.”

He doesn’t hear from Nero and Celsus offers no word either, but what he does hear is the gossip around the Hierarchy. Someone’s found a derelict Reaper.

Garrus knows who found it even before Nero’s standing on his doorstep, asking him if his armor still works and fits, and begging him not to ask any questions. When he sees that dark hull for the first time in a century, Garrus feels real fear.

“Trust me,” Nero says as they suit up, and he can recall a number of times another captain of a ship had asked that of him as the two of them had gone out alone just as they are now. _Trust me, Garrus_ , Shepard had said.

He follows Nero in and every groan of the Reaper is just how he remembers it from the first and only other time he’d been inside one of these things. “This,” he sighs, “isn’t exactly something I ever wanted to be doing again. I was in one of these, you know, a long time ago.”

Nero removes his helmet and Garrus does the same.

“I know. But I think… I think you need to see this, grandfather.”

There were things he should’ve asked or done, like confirmed the air content of the room before he broke the seal on his armor, but it makes no matter now, and not at his age. There were better ways to go out than at home, alone.

Nero steps forward and Garrus is lost drinking in the details of the room around them, trying to suss out the details of just why he’d been brought along. Granted, he really is one of the few experts on Reaper technology they have left, but he’s long since been out of service.

“You waited,” he hears him say and Garrus looks up, realizing Nero isn’t talking to him any longer.

Down by the active mass effect core, there’s someone else, a hologram. They aren’t alone.

“I said I would,” it says.

“Spirits.” A lifetime later, still he knows that voice.

 _Shepard_.

 

 


End file.
